


Not Cut Out for That Sort of Work

by likethenight



Category: Agent Carter (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-21
Updated: 2016-02-21
Packaged: 2018-05-22 11:42:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6078063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/likethenight/pseuds/likethenight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Peggy discovers her true calling. It takes her a little while to realise that she isn't just doing it for Michael.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not Cut Out for That Sort of Work

**Author's Note:**

> Just a little snippet inspired by the glimpses of Peggy's backstory we've finally been given.

When Peggy first accepted the recruitment offer from the Special Operations Executive, she told herself she was doing it for Michael. It was the last thing he had asked of her, after all, and the loss of her beloved older brother ached hard enough inside her that all she wanted - or thought she wanted - was to do every last thing he had ever asked her to do. She resisted the temptation to climb to the very top of the apple tree at the bottom of the garden - well, that had been more of a dare than a request - but when her sobs had subsided and she climbed out of her wedding dress all on her own because her mother was now in no fit state to help her, she hung it back on the mannequin in the corner of her bedroom and promised herself she would not be wearing it again. For Michael, she whispered to herself as she turned her back on it and went to comfort her mother, for Michael, she thought as she told Fred as gently as she could that she couldn’t marry him after all. For Michael, she murmured as she stepped through the unremarkable door at the address printed on the letter from the SOE. 

It took her a while to admit that she wasn’t doing it for Michael, or not entirely, at least. Ducking through another doorway, in an alleyway in Boulogne this time, pressing herself back into the shadows and holding her breath as her pursuers pounded past, the beating of her heart and the enormous grin that spread across her face once she was certain that they’d taken her bait and were not coming back, they were impossible to deny. She was enjoying herself. 

“You’re right again, you utter, utter _arse_ ,” she murmured under her breath to her brother’s presumably watchful ghost. “You’re right, I bloody _love_ this.”

Gradually she let go of the dreams of a comfortable suburban marriage, two well-behaved children and perhaps even a car. She realised that she had hardly even visualised Fred in those rose-tinted fantasies; he would of course have been absent for a lot of the time, working in the City, but even taking that into account, she couldn’t picture herself really living as his wife. Spending her days as a lady of leisure as her mother had once she and Michael were old enough not to need her all the time, perhaps playing bridge with other housewives, finding herself little jobs to do in the garden, perhaps - Peggy realised that she couldn’t see herself living in that sort of life at all. She would have been desperately, crashingly bored, she could admit it to herself now. Fred’s disappointment when she broke off their engagement was not, she now thought, truly because he was desperately in love with her; he had been looking for a safe little wife to fit into his safe little life, and Peggy now found it a little difficult not to despise him for his comfortable posting in the Home Office, when her brave brother was dead and she herself was running around France avoiding Nazis by the skin of her teeth. She had had a narrow escape, she realised now, and she resolved never again to listen to anyone other than herself - and of course the voice of her brother in the back of her mind - when making decisions about her life. 

So when an American with a truly terrible French accent took her aside in an underground bar in Toulouse and asked her if she wanted to work with the Special Scientific Reserve in the United States towards something that would really make a difference in the course of the war, she hesitated only long enough to ask herself what Michael would advise her. And then, knowing that he would have encouraged her to ‘bite their bloody hands off, Peg’, she - metaphorically - did exactly that, and stepped into exactly the sort of life that she had imagined for herself as a child.


End file.
